


Alexandrite

by godvalkyries



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: F/M, Fire Emblem: Awakening Spoilers, Named Avatar, lettie and ricken are roughly the same age otherwise itd be squicky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-30
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 03:56:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7343818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godvalkyries/pseuds/godvalkyries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Alexandrite is said to stimulate pleasure and love. It is also used as a lucky stone."</p><p>Life and Death; Beginning and Ending. Following the cycle, forever turning, never breaking. There are deviations, but never breaks. Two young soldiers face the precipice, hand in hand, and prepare to begin their cycle together.</p><p>Current update - chapter 2: "Love"</p><p>ON HIATUS</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Life

Death, and the threat of death, often has the ability to make people suddenly realise things they may have not noticed, or previously tried to ignore.  
“Get down!”

The screech had come from Lettie, sure, but Ricken did not register it. The javelin flew at what seemed to be the speed of light, pointed straight for his chest. His muscles seized up. The sound of his tome hitting the mud did not register. His breathing ceased. He only came back to his senses when he hit the floor painfully - at first he assumed his arm had been hit, but then he noticed the ginger-brown hair in his face. Looking up, Lettie was crouched protectively over him, lips pulled back over her teeth as she glared at the heavily armored knight facing them down.  
“Not today,” she growled, jumping back up to fling an arcthunder spell at their assailant, sending them flying. Ricken scrambled up beside her, biting back screams of agony, trembling heavily, not quite back in order yet. He very quickly realised that his wrist had swollen badly - no doubt the source of his pain. Hesitantly reaching down for his tome with his good, non dominant hand, he realised it was ruined - even if he could pry the tome out of the boggy mud, the pages would be coated and probably stick together irreperably. He had no more tomes and Chrom and Sully, on convoy duty, were on the other side of the battlefield. 

He was done for.

He didn’t hear Lettie calling for him until she grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him until he looked at her.  
“Ricken! Dear Gods,” she said, her own voice slightly shaky. “You need to listen to me, damn it! Take my tome.” Releasing her fighting partner’s shoulders, she shoved the arcfire tome into his chest, tactfully avoiding his injured side, brandishing her own tome with her other hand.  
“Um,” he began, shakily leafing through the tome as best he could singlehandedly, using his elbow on the injured side as a surface to hold the tome with. “Thank you, Lettie.” A wavering half-laugh half-sigh escaped him as he edged behind the tactician, desperately ignoring his injury. Distraction here could mean death.  
“We have a cavalier on the left coming in soon.”  
“There's two pegasus knights coming on the right much sooner,” she shot back. “We’re gonna have our best chance fighting side by side rather than as one. You take the cavalier - I’ll take the pegasi.”

They fell into position, back-to-back, as they had fought in Maribelle’s rescue. As they had fought many times before. 

One by one the Risen fell. He could feel the tactician slowly winding down, her adrenaline wearing off with the threats decreasing.

-

The pair sat in the medical tent in neighboring beds, Lettie nursing a badly broken left leg from the swipe of one of the pegasus knight’s spears (“Absolutely shattered,” she had heard one of the clerics mutter) and Ricken nursing a broken right wrist from the position he had been thrown down in, both groaning in agony as the spell got to work fusing their bones back together.

“Good thing Tharja paired up with Libra for that one,” Lettie said quietly, running her hand through her hair, seemingly less wavy than the choppy short cut it was usually in. Looking back on it, it was probably a result of the profuse sweating the pain of her healing leg had brought on. “If we both ended up with broken bones, Gods only know what damage Tharja would have taken alone.”  
The silence that greeted her statement caught her off guard; it was not often that Ricken neglected to reply to her. She noted that he was looking at her, almost blankly - and she took it as incredulousity.  
“What? She might follow me around like a deranged puppy, but we are friends, no matter how tenuously. Honestly, I’m happy Libra took out the enemies she couldn’t. She'd be in real danger otherwise.”  
“Muh? Oh.” The small mage shook his head, obviously snapping out of some kind of reverie. “Sorry, I wasn’t really listening.” His eyes glanced down to his lap where he was nursing his healing wrist, sighing quietly.  
“You okay?” Lettie shifted in the infirmary bed, reaching over to the next one to rest her hand on Ricken’s arm. “It isn’t just the healing,” she said, her voice softening. “I know it isn’t just the healing. You don’t usually freeze up in battle like that, either. Remember the time you faced down two Risen at once without hesitation? What’s going on?”

Somehow, he managed to lie through his teeth.  
“Just waiting for a reply to that letter I sent to my family.”

Thoughts of the stone - the stone he would place in the ring he would give the tactician - weighed heavily and anxiously in the back of his mind as Lissa and a couple of other healers bustled in to check up on the injured. He went through the motions - letting the healers prod around his wrist to see how far his healing had come, checking him over for other injuries - but the thoughts of the ring would not fade.

He would just have to wait on the reply from his family.


	2. Love

Weddings were not often a big occurance in the group; Ricken and Lettie’s wedding was no different.  
Even though the war had just ended, there was no time or resources for the luxury of a big ceremony and expensive dresses, even if the bridegroom in question was a noble (despite his family’s poor standing). Instead, it tended to be limited to handmade dresses and vows exchanged in small local chapels or churches. This wedding was no exception to the rule. Maribelle and several of the other women helped hem and sew Lettie into a newly made white wedding dress, ready for the day. She still had some wounds where the hemming needles had poked into her thighs during the fittings.

However, despite not being a big expensive shindig, Shepherd weddings were certainly always bright and happy ceremonies. It was certain that this one would not be the exception.

Lettie stared down her reflection anxiously as she adjusted her skirts. Her hair had been pulled back into a bun of sorts, her bridal veil attached to her by a comb that fitted into her hair. Briefly wondering if it was the fact that it was her wedding day that made her reflection seem to shine, or simply the lighting of the room she was readying herself in, she took a deep breath to steel her nerves. It would be okay. She was marrying her sweetheart, only a week after his sixteenth birthday.  
_The gem had been incredible on its own, but placed into the brass band was enough to reduce Lettie to tears. She had already agreed to be his bride - in her mind it was never a choice, she had already known her decision - so when she slipped the engagement band onto her finger, it felt almost like a dream. Ethereal. Like she must have been dreaming, or imagining. The cool smoothness of the ring, however, reminded her that it was real._  
 _She flung her arms around her fiance, feeling like she could stay that way forever._  
Her hand almost automatically went to the ring on her engagement finger. He had given her a curious ring, a brass band with a gemstone that seemed to change color depending on the light it was shone by. By daylight it was green - by candlelight, a deep, wine-like shade of red. She adored fiddling with the ring, watching the light refract at different angles and shine in different colors depending on the light source.  
Before it had even time to sink in what the time was, Lissa had come to her door to notify her that the ceremony would be beginning soon. There was nothing left to do. Lettie swallowed hard, lifted her skirts a little, and followed her best friend out the door. This was it. They were facing the precipice of their new life together, as a joined couple, that would begin within the hour.

 

By the time the church doors opened again, the tactician and the mage exited as man and wife. The bells in the church tower tolled out the news of the newly formed union, bringing people from across the village to the town square to congratulate the newlywed couple.

_"From this day forth, til death do you part-"_   
_Lettie felt the eyes of her teammates on her, watching the ring exchange, watching the vows. She did not have to look out upon the crowd to know who was crying - Olivia, definitely, would be sobbing. Likely Lissa would be as well._   
_It was a lie to say that Lettie was not swallowing back the lump in her throat, with tears streaking her own face, either._   
_"We do."_

Everyone spilled out of the church in a throng of cheers, sobs, and congratulations. Lettie dried her cheeks with the back of her wrist, smiling brighter than she ever had, hands linked tightly with Ricken's.  
A year ago she had been left in a field alone, no memories, barely any way to protect herself, and now she was a wife. Had she not been found, chances are that she would not be where she stood right there, in her wedding garb, with congratulations from all sides. In a second wave of emotion, more tears spilled down her cheeks as she laughed. Nobody would question it.  
It's her wedding day, after all. Unexplained emotion was perfectly normal on such a day.

_The early noon sunlight pouring through the stained glass windows highlighted the couple, casting a golden glow over them, a truly good sign for their marriage._   
_"Then I now pronounce you man and wife."_   
_Ricken's hands grasped Lettie's a little tighter, as though it would quell his excited shaking._   
_"You may kiss the bride."_

 

The celebrations lasted on through the night, with enough alcohol to put a small brewery out of business. Even when the central people in the party, the bride and groom themselves, had to retire for the night out of exhaustion, many stayed on to continue well into the morning. It had not been long since the war with Plegia ended, and many agreed that there was a dire need for something to lift spirits.  
Unfortunately, a side effect of lifting spirits also seemed to be lifting _spirits_ , per se, and many were hungover the morning after from the sheer amount of alcohol consumed through the night and early morning wedding celebrations.  
Perhaps best of all the wedding gifts the couple had received was the chance to sleep in - a voluntary march within the core group of Shepherds had been planned for the day after the wedding, after hearing reports of a Risen threat in a small neighboring village. Originally the couple had assumed they would be tagging along, but after the night-long celebrations, and the strain of the anxiety that a wedding day brings, they were eternally grateful for the chance to spend the morning sleeping in, waking up to their first day together as a married couple without the stress of knowing that there was things they had to do.  
It also didn't hurt that they weren't the only ones sleeping in that day. Many with hangovers spent the mornings in their beds, nursing the worst headaches of their lives.

By the noon, the newlywed couple woke up together, Lettie curled up tightly on her side and Ricken sprawled out, his arm draped over her side and his leg over hers.  
A good ten minutes were spent curled up together quietly, adjusting to the feeling of waking up with a spouse in their bed, and the knowledge that they would spend every morning of the rest of their lives waking up that way.


End file.
